The five players embroiled in the high-profile Hockey Canada Five rape case are soon expected to be eligible for return to the NHL after a Canadian judge acquitted the men of sexual assault charges stemming from a 2018 incident during a celebration of Team Canada’s gold medal at the World Junior Championship.

The very public trial laid bare many details of the incident, with the judge ultimately ruling that the woman in question consented to sexual encounters with the five players. However, that hasn’t stopped many hockey fans from voicing their opinions that they would not like to see the players reinstated into the NHL.

In all likelihood, just two players are primed to make an NHL roster this upcoming season: Carter Hart and Michael McLeod. The Vegas Golden Knights and Carolina Hurricanes are considering signing Hart, who was the starting goaltender for the Philadelphia Flyers for much of his career. And the Hurricanes are also considering signing McLeod, a third-line center.

The players’ inevitable returns have understandably been a topic of conversation in the media. Neither has played since the 2023-24 season, when they were forced to take a leave of absence as they addressed the scandal. As such, reporters are eager to ask questions about how a team might address their return.

Mark Lazerus, a senior NHL writer for The Athletic, recently traveled to both Las Vegas and Raleigh, N.C., to inquire about a possible return for these players. One franchise, however, wasn’t ready to speak with Lazerus. In fact, the Golden Knights went so far as to revoke Lazerus’s press credentials and kick him out of the team’s practice facility. Lazerus recounts the situation in a piece recently published in The Athletic:

“The team declined to allow head coach Bruce Cassidy to speak to The Athletic one-on-one after learning of the topic. Several minutes later, before Cassidy began a news conference, the spokesperson pulled an Athletic reporter out of the room and told him to leave the team’s practice facility immediately. The Athletic’s press pass for that evening’s preseason game was revoked. The spokesperson said The Athletic had ‘ambushed’ Noah Hanifin during routine locker-room media interviews that morning and the team was not ‘comfortable’ allowing the reporter to cover the game.”

Despite the alleged “ambush,” Golden Knights defenseman Noah Hanifin readily answered questions about the possibility of Hart joining the team. “Whenever you’re in a locker room with guys, you’re brothers, you’re family,” Hanifin told The Athletic. “You’re trying to take care of each other, no matter what’s going on, good or bad, off the ice. You want to make sure that when guys come to the rink, they feel they have the support and that they’re part of it. That’s a huge part of being on a team.”

That doesn’t seem like the type of response a player would give after being ambushed by a reporter.

Time and again, organizations like the Golden Knights draw more attention to a situation by trying to suppress a journalist than if they allowed the reporter to do their job. Rather than crafting the sort of non-answer that would’ve elicited a few eye rolls to the few paying attention, the Golden Knights now look guilty in front of a much wider audience.

Revoking a reporter’s credentials almost never goes well in these circumstances. Now, the Golden Knights will have to deal with critical press coverage surrounding a possible acquisition of Hart, in addition to criticism over trying to dodge the story.